The qualification process comprises several tests with different characteristics and goals. One of these tests is specifically designed for verifying the resilience of DUT's power supply unit (PSU) to supply voltage anomalies, which are pretty common in industrial environments. This Technical Note (TN for short) describes how we run this test.

To make this test possible, DAVE Embedded Systems designed an ad hoc smart bench power supply denoted as PPSU. PPSU is used to power the DUT, which is the electronic device under test. You can think of PPSU as a programmable power waveform generator that is also able to verify the health status of the DUT. PPSU can generate an arbitrary supply voltage that exhibits purposely anomalies such as glitches of different duration and non-monotonic ramps. A robust product is expected to be resilient against these stressing conditions. This means that it is supposed not to be affected at all or to perform properly a warm reboot cycle if it is inevitable that a hardware reset is triggered. Of course, the expected behavior strongly depends on the nature and severity of injected anomalies. After the anomaly is injected, PPSU verifies whether the DUT is operating properly or not and logs the test result. PPSU can also be programmed to run the test cycle repeatedly for the desired number of iterations.